Some good candidates but we’d like some more. We have four board seats to fill, and it’s clearly a more healthy democratic situation if we’ve got a bit of a choice. We’re looking for people who can lead our organisation to success in 2011 and going forwards. We’d like to see dedicated OSMers, people who are engaged with the community, but perhaps also people who are in a position to reach out beyond the community. We’d also like to see geographic diversity. The relative importance of these factors will be up to the voters.

If you have ideas for people who fit the bill, now is the time to have a whisper in their ear and persuade them to run for election. Ideally candidates will ensure there is a description of themselves on their wiki user page, and preferably also an election manifesto, before adding themselves to the list. But don’t forget nominations close on Wednesday 31st in time for voting to commence the day after.

To run as a candidate, and also to take part in voting you need to be a fully paid up member of the foundation, so be sure to join the foundation now if you haven’t already.

Management Team

Another recent change has been the introduction of a new “Management Team”. This new group is made up of representatives from the various working groups and (as detailed on the Management Team page) is tasked with regular feedback from/to the working groups, scoping of working groups, and decisions around implementing the budget. One of the main reasons behind this is to ease the workload of the board by taking care of some of the day-to-day trouble-shooting issues. There are various potential downsides to this idea, which people have raised on the osmf-talk mailing list. It remains to be seen how well it will work, and nothing is set in stone, but hopefully this will make life easier for board members new and old, and free them up to do more strategic decision-making.

Engineering Working Group

Also announced recently, we have a new “Engineering Working Group” with the task of assisting and guiding the community-driven development of OSM-related source code and tools. Again it remains to be seen how well this will work, and this is very open to some more keen participation. To be clearer about separation of concerns here, the “Technical Working Group” has been renamed as the “Operations Working Group”. You can find definitions of all of these teams, their membership, and their meeting details linked from the Working Groups page .

Henk Hoff, Secretary of the OpenStreetMap Foundation, announced today that the next Annual General Meeting of the OSMF and election for board members will be held at State of the Map – Denver.

To all members of OpenStreetMap Foundation,

NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that the 5th Annual General Meeting of the OpenStreetMap Foundation will be held at the State of the Map 2011 conference, Auraria Campus, Denver, Colorado, USA, at 12:30 MDT, Sunday, 11 September 2011.

You do NOT have to join the conference to attend the meeting. Attendance of the AGM is free. However, if you would also like to join SOTM 2011, you can still register at http://stateofthemap.org/register-now/

All (at the start of the AGM) paid-up members of the Foundation are eligible to stand for election to the Board. If you are not already a member of the Foundation then you can sign up via http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Join.
If you have questions concerning your membership contact membership [AT] osmfoundation.org .

All (at the start of the AGM) paid-up members of the Foundation are eligible to vote at the Board election.

They’re a set of Khan Academy style videos. That is they’re each short 5-15 minute videos on a particular topic of OpenStreetMap. Right now there’s about two hours of video, covering the basic concepts: all the way from nodes and tags, to routing, changesets and rendering.

We are less than a month away from the Fifth Annual OpenStreetMap conference, State of the Map. It will be held in Denver, Colorado, from the 9th to the 11th of September.

Most of the schedule spots are now published, and the few remaining spots will be confirmed shortly. More than forty talks and panels cover subjects of interest to beginners, experts and everybody in between.